nder Louis
XVII? What! Danton was another Monk. What! Chaumette and the Hebertists,
falser than the Federalists who sent them to the guillotine, had
conspired to destroy the State! But among those who hurried to their
death the traitor Danton and the traitor Chaumette, will not the blue
eye of Robespierre discover anon more perfidious traitors yet? What will
be the end of this hideous concatenation of traitors betrayed and the
revelations of the keen-sighted Incorruptible?..."

XXI

Meantime Julie Gamelin, in her bottle-green box-coat, went every day to
the Luxembourg Gardens and there, on a bench at the end of one of the
avenues, sat waiting for the moment when her lover should show his face
at one of the dormers of the Palace. Then they would beckon to each
other and talk together in a language of signs they had invented. In
this way she learned that the prisoner occupied a fairly good room and
had pleasant companions, that he wanted a blanket for his bed and a
kettle and loved his mistress fondly.

She was not the only one to watch for the sight of a dear face at a
window of the Palace now turned into a prison. A young mother not far
from her kept her eyes fixed on a closed casement; then directly she saw
it open, she would lift her little one in her arms above her head. An
old lady in a lace veil sat for long hours on a folding-chair, vainly
hoping to catch a momentary glimpse of her son, who, for fear of
breaking down, never left his game of quoits in the courtyard of the
prison till the hour when the gardens were closed.

During these long hours of waiting, whether the sky were blue or
overcast, a man of middle age, rather stout and very neatly dressed, was
constantly to be seen on a neighbouring bench, playing with his
snuff-box and the charms on his watch-guard or unfolding a newspaper,
which he never read. He was dressed like a bourgeois of the old school
in a gold-laced cocked hat, a plum-coloured coat and blue waistcoat
embroidered in silver. He looked well-meaning enough, and was something
of a musician to judge by a flute, one end of which peeped from his
pocket. Never for a moment did his eyes wander from the supposed
stripling, on whom he bestowed continual smiles, and when he saw him
leave his seat, he would get up himself and follow him at a distance.
Julie, in her misery and loneliness, was touched by the discreet
sympathy the good man manifested.

One day, as she was leaving the gardens,